WORLD TRADE

This is a good, but not great, neo-prog album. About half the songs are excellent, in particular "Wasting Time," the other half are forgettable AOR. It's clear Billy Sherwood & Co. had been listening to Yes' Big Generator album a lot, and if you like Big Generator, you'll like this.

Put on to this as one of Classic Rock magazine's 'top ten prog albums of the eighties', this had much to live up to. Sadly it fails. We end up with someone trying to sound like the 'Yes' of the same period, which isn't exactly saying alot. 'Big generator' must be one of Yes' least memorable albums, and this follows suit.

I personally prefer my Yes music to be a bit more 'moody' than this repetitively paced offering. 'Classic Rock' were right that the stand-out song is 'The revolution song', which is very catchy, but listen some more and 'Sense of freedom' stands out as a not to bad attempt to be moody, whilst the last song, 'Open the door' is worthy too.

Overall though, I found it a shallow ride.

Any hard core Yes fan knows who Billy Sherwood is. He first appeared with Yes as a producer on one track of the ill-received "Union" album, and became a full fledged band member for the dismal "Open Your Eyes" and the much better "The Ladder". But before Yes, he was in World Trade, a Yes clone. Not just a Yes clone, but a clone of the 1980's pop Yes.

This, World Trade's first album, has a very strong Yes influence. That is, if you consider "Big Generator" truly Yes. It doesn't come close to "90125" in progressiveness or inventiveness, but it does have some listenable moments. However, they lose points for Fight To Win, that is way to obviously a ripoff of "Owner Of A Lonely Heart.

Another comparison at many times is to It Bites. For some reason, they have almost as much of a resemblance to that band as they do to Yes.

Their moment was yet to come

World Trade evolved out of an earlier band called Lodgic that had released an album called Nomadic Sands in 1985 (which I have yet to hear). This self-titled debut of World Trade appeared in 1989 and featured a line-up of Billy Sherwood, Bruce Gowdy, Guy Allison, and Mark Williams. Other reviewers have compared this music to Yes' 90125 as well as to the band It Bites and I have to agree that these comparisons are spot on. This album is very much of its time.

With the exception of the brief instrumental that opens the album, the songs are all around four to five minutes in length and the style is rather standard, mildly progressive Pop Rock. The songs are relatively catchy and of reasonable quality, and this is by no means a bad album. However, there is nothing too special here either.

The band's next album Euphoria would be a vast improvement over this debut and point in the direction of Billy Sherwood's future career as a solo artist and beyond, but here there are only a few slight hints of what was to come later. Being a massive Yes fan with a keen interest in anything related to Yes, including Billy Sherwood's impressive solo career, checking this album out was of course inevitable for me. If you have similar interests then you will also want to hear this.